After months of waiting and following up I'm finally starting to land some interviews! Today I was contacted by Carnival, so I wanted to request some insight into the interview process for the A/V Media Staff position, or Carnival interviews in general. As always any help will be much appreciated!

A man called Marius Mihaescu (he's in charge of the hiring) called me from one the ships. It was a lot of fun talking to him, he was really laid back and friendly. He even let a little "and sh*t" slip during the conversation. I didn't actually get into the interview part, since he first took his time to explain that the position was no longer what was listed on their website (it will be updated soon). Instead of being geared towards shooting/editing, it is now mostly just technical, (repairing/setting up AV equipment, etc.). I am not very interested in such a technical position, so we didn't proceed into what he called the interview, 20 questions (technical, I assume) of which it would be necessary to answer 15 or so correct. I am not sure what else would be involved. What I can say is that it was very enjoyable and easy to talk with him. He even mentioned that if at any point in the future I became interested, I should contact him. In his own words, "we're always here". I sent him a thank you letter and that was it.

I'm also more of a shooting/editing guy and I also did this interview. Boy was it HARD! It was around 75% questions about technical things. The Carnival A/V Media staff is very much about the technical side of things.

For anyone who has this interview in the future, expect lots of questions about different types of cables, video formats and their specifics (How many KB per second in a typical NTSC video?), signals (both over cables and over the air), and how satellites and distribution systems work.

In the past I have only known enough about cables to get by (obvious things like a cable with a round end goes into a round plug and a cable with a square-shaped digital end goes into a square-shaped digital plug) but it's not enough for Carnival for you to know these things by sight. It's also important to know their names.

On the other hand, I did an interview to be a video guy for Norwegian a few months ago, and their questions were all about shooting, editing (FCP), and Photoshop. So don't expect every cruise line to give such a technically-based interview.